The skeleton is remarkable in that it is the most complete australopithecine individual ever discovered, and is among the most complete in the entire hominin fossil record. Below I’ve compared it to the most complete Australopithecus afarensis (KSD-VP-1/1 and AL 288-1), A. africanus (StW 431 and Sts 14), and A. sediba (MH1-2); the Dikika infant would be a neat comparison, too, but I don’t know of any photos of its bones nicely laid out. The other skeletons are practically naked (or dismembered) compared to Little Foot.

Little Foot (red) compared with other australopithecine skeletons. Images not to scale! (Photo credit: The Internet!)

Beyond it’s completeness, the other parts of story of Little Foot are equally fascinating – from its discovery based on already-known fragments to the possibility that it is older than “Lucy” (AL-288). Ron Clarke has painstakingly and I’d say very successfully removed the skeleton from the hard breccia in which the fossils were encased. Having spent the better part of the past two decades with the skeleton, he has argued that Little Foot represents a second hominin species at Sterkfontein, Australopithecus prometheus (Clarke 2013), the species to which hominin fossils at Makapansgat were originally attributed (Dart 1948). With the unveiling of the skeleton, I’d guess that in the coming years we’ll see renewed investigations into the number of species at Sterkfontein, and the general comparison between hominins from there and Makapansgat.

From pictures in the media releases, we can see a few things that weren’t known from previous publications. I’ll outline a few here, but emphasize that these are only superficial observations and will need to be borne out by further research.

“EXPELLIARMUS”

At the top of the trunk, the cervical vertebra seems to have a fairly wide spinal canal, a human-like ‘bulging’ which Meyer and Hausler (2015) suggest might reflect innervation of highly manipulative hominin hands.

Close up of the skull and upper trunk of StW 573, highlighting the cervical vertebral canal (white arrow) and first rib (orange arrow). Original photo credit: AP//Themba Hadebe.

In addition, the first rib may be relatively long front-to-back (as opposed to wide side-to-side), possibly indicating a more barrel-like chest than in other early hominins; the angle of the photo and the clear break between the proximal and distal portions, however, makes this unclear.

Hominin first ribs/bacon, with StW 573 on the far right. Not to scale! Modified from this post.

The distal forelimb (i.e., radius and ulna) are not as elongated as in apes, but the femur is not as elongated as in the genus Homo. From the pictures, the femur neck appears short like in humans, not as elongated as is characteristic for australopiths and early Homo.

Limb proportion comparison. Humerus (top row), radius & ulna (middle), and femur (bottom). Image modified from Asfaw et al. (1999). StW 573 scaled to same humerus length as the human. Note also that all bones are from the right except the StW 573 upper limb.

The apparently short femur neck, similar to humans, contrasts with the wide, flaring ilium of the pelvis. This appears fairly flat, short and wide (Australopithecus af) compared to modern humans’ more strongly curved ilium. But this inference is just from a picture and it’s likely that the fossil needs a bit of reconstruction to uncover the true anatomy.

I’d like to emphasize that these are just first impressions based on press release photos, and actual analysis of the skeleton are necessary to tell if these impressions are correct. As could be expected, the skeleton as a whole looks typically australopithecine, although the short femur neck may be a bit different. As 2017 draws to a close, let’s hope 2018 sees the testing of these predictions.

References

Asfaw B. et al. 1999. Australopithecus garhi: a new species of early hominid from Ethiopia. Science 284: 629-635.

I taught this for the first time last Spring, so the Fall syllabus is updated based on how things went in the first go around. This time, students will get more more in depth with the fossil hominins and less on the lithics on the early side. On the more recent end, there are now readings expressly concerned with sites of the Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex, as well as archaeology of both the Tarim and Pazyryk mummies.

This is a seminar version of the first class I ever made on my own, previously taught at the University of Michigan and Nazarbayev University. There have been lots of new discoveries and I’ve published more on this topic since the last time I taught the class. I’m also excited to see how this class goes as a seminar in which students contribute more to discussion, rather than me rambling on about osteoblasts, morphological integration, and the like.

This is a 100% brand spankin new class, that uses the climate-denialist argument, “But climate has always been changing,” as a basis for comparing the past and the present. In this First-year Writing Seminar, we’ll compare arguments for defining the “Anthropocene,” examine how climate change may have impacted human evolution, and study archaeological evidence for how climate change has impacted different prehistoric societies.

Last month I was flying down to New Orleans for the AAPA conference. I was excited to try authentic beignets & sazeracs, present new research, and catch up with colleagues. Midway through the flight I glanced out the window, not expecting to see much. But lo!

Thankfully there wasn’t something on the wing. But there was something strange out there in the sparkle of sprawling city lights:

What’s that I spy outside the city center?

A bit outside of the main jumble of street lamps appears to be a concentration of light superficially similar to an incus, one of the three auditory ossicles of the middle ear:

As a good mammal, there are three small bones inside your middle ear. These are fully formed at birth, and help transfer and amplify sound vibrations from your eardrum to your inner ear. It’s nuts. What’s even more nuts is that paleontologists and anatomists have figured out that the tiny, internal incus and malleus of mammals evolved from larger, external pieces of the jaws of our pre-mammalian ancestors. INSANITY!

Being so tiny, it’s not surprising that auditory ossicles are not often recovered from skeletal remains, and are pretty rare in the human fossil record. Nevertheless, some are known and their comparison with humans’ ossicles is pretty interesting. The oldest inci I know of are from SK 848 and SKW 18, Australopithecus robustus fossils from Swartkrans in South Africa (Rak and Clarke, 1979; Quam et al., 2013). SK 848 is on the left in the set of images below:

Incus bones in three different views of SK 848, human chimpanzee, gorilla, sock puppet (left to right). Modified from Rak and Clarke, 1979.

SK 848 to differs from humans and African apes in looking more like a screaming sock puppet with a horn on the back of its head. Additional ossicles are known from South African australopithecines, including the older A. africanus from Sterkfontein (Quam et al., 2013). Interestingly, malleus of these hominins is very similar to that of humans, and Quam et al. (2013) think this ossicle may be one of the first bones in the entire skeleton to take on a human-like configuration during hominin evolution. Functionally, this may mean that the frequency range to which human ears are adapted may have appeared pretty early in our lineage as well (Quam et al., 2015).

Who’d’ve thunk we’d learn so much just from looking out an airplane window?

I’m recently returned from this year’s AAPA Conference, hosted by Tulane University in New Orleans. What a trip!

Usually my presentations involve fossils and/or growth, but this year I wanted to try a different way of looking at the evolution & development – integration & modularity. In short, biological structures that share a common developmental background and/or function may comprise ‘modules’ that are highly ‘integrated’ with one another, but relatively less integrated with other structures or modules.

I hypothesized that canine reduction in hominins is a result of a shift in modularity of the dentition, such that the canine became more highly integrated with the incisors than with the premolars. I’d thought of this 5 years ago when creating the first rendition of my human evo-devo course (offering again next fall!), but never got to look into it. Interestingly, the results generally supported my predictions, except for one pesky sample…

As my primatologist friends will tell you, male chimps are the worst.

Here’s a pdf version of the poster. It was fun to dabble with a new methodology, to see my far-flung friends, and to visit a fun historic place for the AAPA conference. Definitely looking forward to next year in Austin!

The site’s been quiet in 2017, with little time to blog on top of my regular professional responsibilities, and of course watching the fascist smoke rising from the garbage fire of our 45th presidential administration with horrified disbelief. At work, my two new classes are keeping me plenty busy, and their content is quite distinct – one is on the archaeological record of Central Asia, the other centers around Homo naledi to teach about fossils. But by complete accident, examples of scientific racism came up in the readings for each course last week.

Scientific racism refers to using data or evidence from the biological and social sciences to support racist arguments, that one racial group is better or worse than another group; the groups of course, are culturally determined rather than empirically discrete biological entities. This evidence is often cherry-picked, misinterpreted, and/or outright weak. Nicolas’ Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritanceis a recent example of such a work. The book’s racial claims amount to nothing more than handwaving, and so egregious is the misrepresentation of genetic evidence that nearly 150 of the world’s top geneticists signed a letter to the editor rebuking Wade for “misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies.” Wade’s book has no place in scientific discourse, but then almost anyone can write a book as long as a publisher thinks it will sell.

In addition to the outright misrepresentation of scientific evidence to support racist arguments, another manifestation of scientific racism is the influence of cultural biases in the interpretation of empirical observations. This may be less malicious than the first example, but is equally dangerous as it more tacitly supports systemic and pervasive racism. And this brings us to my classes’ recent readings.

First was a reference to the “Movius Line” in a review of the Paleolithic record of Central Asia (Vishnyatsky 1999) for my prehistory class. Back in the 1940s Hallum Movius, archaeologist and amazing-name-haver, noticed a distinct geographic pattern in the distribution of early stone tool technology across the Old World: “hand-axes” could be found at sites across Africa and western Eurasia, while they were largely absent from East Asian sites, which were dominated by more basic stone tools.

Movius’ illustration of the distribution of Early Paleolithic technologies. From Fig. 1 in Dennell (2015).

Robin Dennell (2016) provides a nice review of how Movius’ personal, culturally influenced perception of China colored his interpretation of this pattern. Movius read this archaeological evidence to mean that early East Asian humans were unable to create the more advanced technology of the west, a biological and cognitive deficiency resulting from cultural separation: “East Asia gives the impression of having acted (just as historical China and in sharp contrast with the Mediterranean world) as an isolated and self-sufficient area, closed to any major human migratory wave” (Movius 1941: 86, cited in Dennell 2015). Racial and cultural stereotypes about East Asia directly translated to his interpretation of an archaeological pattern.

This type of old school scientific racism also arose in a review of endocasts (Falk, 2014) for my Homo naledi class. Endocasts are negative impressions or casts of a space or cavity, and comprise the only direct evidence of what extinct animals’ brains looked like. So to see how the structure of the brain has changed over the course of human evolution, scientists can search for the impressions of important brain structures in fossil human endocasts. Falk (2014) reviews one of the most famous of these structures – the “lunate sulcus” – which was used as evidence for reorganization of the hominin brain for nearly 100 years. In the early 20th century, anatomist and anthropologist GE Smith (not GE Smith from the Saturday Night Live Band) thought he’d identified the human homologue of a groove that in apes separates the parietal lobe from the visual cortex. In humans, however, this groove was positioned more toward the back of the brain, which Smith interpreted as an expansion of an area relating to advanced cognition.

The back of the brain, viewed from the left, of a chimpanzee (left) and two humans, the red line illustrating the Affenspalte or lunate sulcus (Fig. 1 from Falk 2014, which was modified from Smith 1903). The middle one also might be a grumpy fish.

It turns out that the lunate sulcus does not actually exist in humans, as the grooves identified as such are not structurally or functionally the same as the lunate sulcus in apes (Allen et al., 2006). Nevertheless, given what Smith thought the lunate sulcus was, it’s tragic to read his interpretations of human variation: “resemblance to the Simian [ape] pattern… is not quite so obvious…. in European types of brain….” (Smith 1904: 437, quoted in Falk 2014). The human condition for this trait was for it to be located in the back, reflecting an expansion of the cognitive area in front of it, and this pattern was less pronounced, according to Smith, in non-European people’s brains. This interpretation reflects two traditions at the time: 1) to refer to racial ‘types,’ ignoring variation within and overlap between groups, as well as 2) the prevailing wisdom that Europeans were more intelligent or advanced than other geographical groups.

Anecdotes such as these may seem like mere scientific and historical curios, but they should serve as important reminders both that science can be accidentally guided by cultural values, or intentionally used for malevolent ends. Misconceptions and errors of the past shouldn’t be erased, but rather touted so that we don’t repeat mistakes that can have major consequences in our not-so-post-racial society.

As we’re wrapping up what may be the worst year in recent global memory, especially geopolitically, let’s take a moment to review some more positive things that came up at Lawnchair in 2016.

Headed home

Alternate subtitle: Go West
This was a quiet year on the blog, with only 18 posts compared with the roughly thirty per year in 2014-2015. The major reason for the silence was that I moved from Kazakhstan back to the US to join the Anthropology Department at Vassar College in New York. With all the movement there was less time to blog. Much of the second half of 2016 was spent setting up the Biological Anthropology Lab at Vassar, which will focus on “virtual” anthropology, including 3D surface scanning…

Cast of early Homo cranium KNM-ER 1470 and 3D surface scan made in the lab using an Artec Spider.

… and 3D printing.

A gibbon endocast, created from a CT scan using Avizo software and printed on a Zortrax M200.

This first semester stateside I reworked my ‘Intro to Bio Anthro’ and ‘Race’ courses, which I think went pretty well being presented to an American audience for the first time. The latter class examines human biological variation, situating empirical observations in modern and historical social contexts. This is an especially important class today as 2016 saw a rise in nationalist and racist movements across the globe. Just yesterday Sarah Zhang published an essay in The Atlantic titled, “Will the Alt-right peddle a new kind of racist genetics?” It’s a great read, and I’m pleased to say that in the Race class this semester, we addressed all of the various social and scientific issues that came up in that piece. Admittedly though, I’m dismayed that this scary question has to be raised at this point in time, but it’s important for scholars to address and publicize given our society’s tragically short and selective memory.

So the first semester went well, and next semester I’ll be teaching a seminar focused on Homo naledi and a mid-level course on the prehistory of Central Asia. The Homo naledi class will be lots of fun, as we’ll used 3D printouts of H. naledi and other hominin species to address questions in human evolution. The Central Asia class will be good prep for when I return to Kazakhstan next summer to continue the hunt for human fossils in the country.

Osteology is still everywhere

A recurring segment over the years has been “Osteology Everywhere,” in which I recount how something I’ve seen out and about reminds me of a certain bone or fossil. Five of the blog 18 posts this year were OAs, and four of these were fossiliferous: I saw …

And a Homo erectus cranium on a Bangkok sidewalk. As I’m teaching a fossil-focused seminar next semester, OA will probably become increasingly about fossils, and I’ll probably get my students involved in the fun as well.

New discoveries and enduring questions

The most-read post on the blog this year was about the recovery of the oldest human Nuclear DNA, from the 450,000 year old Sima de los Huesos fossils. My 2013 prediction that nuclear DNA would conflict with mtDNA by showing these hominins to be closer to Neandertals than Denisovans was shown to be correct.

These results are significant in part because they demonstrate one way that new insights can be gained from fossils that have been known for years. But more intriguingly, the ability of researchers to extract DNA from exceedingly old fossils suggests that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The comparison between monkey-made and anthropogenic stone tools drives home the now dated fact that humans aren’t the only rock-modifiers. But the significance for the evolution of human tool use is less clear cut – what are the parallels (if any) in the motivation and modification of rocks between hominins and capuchins, who haven’t shared a common ancestor for tens of millions of years? I’m sure we’ll hear more on that in the coming years.

In the case of whether Neandertal brain development is like that of humans, I pointed out that new study’s results differ from previous research probably because of differences samples and methods. The only way to reconcile this issue is for the two teams of researchers, one based in Zurich and the other in Leipzig, to come together or for a third party to try their hand at the analysis. Maybe we’ll see this in 2017, maybe not.

There were other cool things in 2016 that I just didn’t get around to writing about, such as the publication of new Laetoli footprints with accompanying free 3D scans, new papers on Homo naledi that are in press in the Journal of Human Evolution, and new analysis of old Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) fossils suggesting that she spent a lifetime climbing trees but may have sucked at it. But here’s hoping that 2017 tops 2016, on the blog, in the fossil record, and basically on Earth in general.

It’s the end of the year and I’ve got Homo erectus on the brain somethin fierce. Our precedent-erect first popped up in Africa around 1.9 million years ago, quickly spread throughout much of the Old World, and persisted until perhaps as late as ~ 100,000 years ago in Java, Indonesia. This was a very successful species by all accounts, and as a result of its great range and duration, you can imagine it was also pretty variable.

Despite this great variation, H. erectus skulls generally share a common visage: long and low cranial vault, low forehead, protruding brow ridges, fun tuberosities and tori in the back. You’d recognize them anywhere. Including the sidewalk!

Homo erectus in front of Ploenchit Tower, Bangkok (lateral view, front is to the right).

The relief in this sidewalk slat superficially looks like a trace fossil of partial H. erectus cranium, the face either missing (from the lower right) or taphonomically displaced toward the left side of the tile (see here for actual H. erectus trace fossils). This looks really similar to H. erectus from Indonesia, not surprising given its discovery in Thailand. Why, it could have come straight out of Figure 6 from a 2006 paper by Yousuke Kaifu and colleagues:

Left lateral views of Javanese H. erectus crania, modestly modified from Kaifu et al. (2006: Fig. 6). Front is to the left this time.

Using my insane photo editing skills, I’ve inserted the Ploenchit Tower trace fossil (reversed) within the horde of heads presented by Kaifu et al., above. Like many of the real fossils, the Ploenchit specimen is missing the face (due to taphonomy), the supraorbital torus or brow ridge juts out from a low-rising forehead, and the occipital bone also projects out about from the otherwise rounded contour of the cranium. Note that there is a good deal of variation in each of these features among the real fossils.

What a happy holiday accident to find a Homo erectus cranium on the street!